Stream Revenue Estimator

How the calculator works

This tool is a transparent, deterministic revenue model. No AI, no live API calls, no sign-up. Every output is calculated from the inputs in your browser using the published 2026 revenue splits for Twitch Affiliate, Twitch Partner (premium contract), and Kick. The point is not to predict your future income. That depends on your category, your audience geography, your sponsorship pipeline, and dozens of variables we cannot know. The point is to make the structural math visible: how much of a $5 sub actually reaches the streamer on each platform, what changes when you add a Tier 3 sub or a US-heavy ad audience, and where your projected number sits relative to the public 2021 Twitch payout leak.

Three assumption blocks drive everything. First, the per-tier sub payouts: $2.50 / $5.00 / $12.50 on Twitch Affiliate (50/50 default); $3.49 / $6.99 / $17.49 on the Twitch Partner Plus 70/30 tier (unlocked at 300 Plus Points; Twitch retired the legacy contractual 70/30 for new Partners in January 2024); $4.74 / $9.49 / $23.74 on Kick (95/5). Second, $0.01 per Bit on Twitch and per KICK on Kick. That's a generous round number that matches Twitch's published rate and approximates Kick's. Third, regional ad CPM bands sourced from streamercalculator and StreamElements averages: US $4–6, EU $2–4, UK $3–5, LATAM $0.50–1.50, SEA $1–3. Direct tips and sponsorship pass through 1:1; neither has a platform cut at the StreamElements / Streamlabs / Patreon level relevant here, so we attribute them to all three platforms equally.

Twitch vs Kick: the 95/5 math, fully unpacked

A $4.99 Tier 1 Twitch sub pays the creator $2.50 as an Affiliate. The same sub on Kick pays $4.74. At 100 subs/month that's $250 vs $474, a $224 structural delta with identical audience engagement. At 500 subs the delta is $1,120/month. At 1,000 subs (career-viable territory) it's $2,240/month, or $26,880 per year of the same labor producing different paychecks before audience-size differences. This is the single biggest economic input in the platform-choice decision and the reason the question "should I leave Twitch for Kick" gets asked thousands of times a month.

It does not mean Kick is categorically better. Kick's audience is roughly one-tenth the size of Twitch's, so the same follower-acquisition work yields fewer subscribers per hour streamed. Twitch's recommendation surface (front page, category pages, related-stream sidebars) still dwarfs Kick's discovery flywheel. Per sub, Kick wins by a large margin; per hour of growth labor, Twitch usually wins. The Kick vs Twitch 2026 comparison walks through the audience-size vs per-sub tradeoff with migration-conversion math.

Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, Prime, and gifted subs

Most calculators stop at Tier 1, and on the median channel that's roughly accurate, since 80 %+ of paid subs come in at $4.99. But Tier 2 ($9.99) and Tier 3 ($24.99) are disproportionate revenue. A single Tier 3 sub on Twitch Affiliate is worth five Tier 1 subs ($12.50 vs $2.50). A "small" channel with 100 Tier 1 + 5 Tier 3 subs is the revenue equivalent of 125 Tier 1: a 25 % uplift that vanishes if you only model Tier 1.

Prime subs are special: free to the viewer (bundled with Amazon Prime) but paid to the streamer at the Tier 1 rate. There is no streamer-side downside to Prime subs. They cost the viewer nothing extra and pay the same. The only oddity is that Prime sub counts can appear inflated in dashboards because they auto-renew until cancelled. Gifted subs work the same on the payout side. A gifted Tier 1 pays the streamer exactly $2.50 / $3.50 / $4.74 on the three rows. The gifter's payment doesn't reduce the creator share.

Where would your income rank?

The 2021 Twitch payout leak is the most-cited public dataset in streamer economics. Published in October 2021, it covered Twitch's gross payouts to roughly 10,000 channels from August 2019 through September 2021. 26 months of data. Numbers were widely reported across The Verge, Engadget, Forbes, and the GitHub mirror community. We use bucketed percentile thresholds only, never raw rows, to stay clear of any DMCA risk and to give you a directional anchor.

Approximate monthly equivalents (2-year totals divided by 24): Top 100 channels ≈ $62,500/mo and up; Top 1,000 ≈ $10,400/mo; Top 10,000 ≈ $1,300/mo; Top 100,000 ≈ $200/mo. The leak captures only the top tail. Most Twitch streamers earn nothing meaningful and don't appear at all. If your projected revenue clears $200/mo, you're already inside the top ~1 % of monetised streamers by the leak baseline. If it clears $1,300/mo, you're inside the top 0.1 %. Treat these as a frame, not a forecast. The top-tail composition has shifted since publication (gambling streamers off Twitch in 2022, Kick migrations in 2023–24, ad CPM resets), and a 2026 baseline would look different.

What the calculator does not include

Four caveats. The sponsorship field accepts a single monthly number, but real brand deals are bursty: a $20K activation in Q1 and nothing in Q2 is normal. For sustained income the field models the average; for one-off flights it's better to project across the full year and divide. Payment-processor fees: Stripe, PayPal, and Twitch / Kick payout fees take 2–4 % depending on country and method. Bank wires can take a flat $5–25 per payout. Subscriber churn: Twitch's auto-renew rate is roughly 70–80 % month over month, so 100 active subs is not 100 new subs. It's roughly 100 retained from a slightly larger gross. Taxes: federal, state, and self-employment taxes can take 25–40 % of net depending on jurisdiction. Use the Streamer Tax Estimator for the country-specific take-home view.

Reverse-engineering a $3,000/month target

On Twitch Affiliate at the regional US ad CPM, $3,000/month is reachable several ways. The sub-only path is roughly 1,200 Tier 1 subs (1,200 × $2.50). The mixed-economy path is more realistic: 600 Tier 1 + 50 Tier 2 + 5 Tier 3 ($1,500 + $250 + $62.50 ≈ $1,812) plus 50K Bits ($500), $400 in tips, and one $300/mo brand retainer. The same target on Kick is roughly 633 Tier 1 subs alone (633 × $4.74), a 47 % reduction in subscriber count for the same outcome. That gap is the lever Kick has used in every migration pitch since 2022.

Plug different scenarios into the tool: current state, +50 % subs, +100 % subs, audience region shift from US to LATAM. The most useful output is rarely the absolute total. It's the sensitivity. Where does an extra hour of mid-roll inventory move the dial vs an extra Tier 3 sub? On a 200-CCV channel in the US an extra mid-roll per hour at 80 hours a month adds roughly $80/month at the mid CPM. One additional Tier 3 sub adds $12.50/month. Eight Tier 3 subs equal one extra mid-roll per hour, but Tier 3 subs are far stickier. The calculator makes that comparison concrete instead of theoretical.

How to use this for planning

Use it three ways. First, as a floor check: what's the worst-case monthly income at my current numbers and the lowest regional CPM? If the floor is below your survival threshold, you need either more subs or a sponsorship pipeline. Second, as a scenario tool: what does +20 % subs and a switch from EU to US-heavy audience produce? Third, as a platform-decision tool: what does my identical audience look like on Kick? The 95/5 vs 50/50 delta is rarely smaller than 80 % of one platform's sub revenue. That's the actual cost of staying on Twitch for the discovery flywheel and the actual benefit of Kick.